Yeah, I do read HP ff. Mostly on fanfiction.net. My fav pairings are H/Hr, SS/Hr and TR/Hr. I love time travel fics and enjoy SS/LE a lot. If you never tried that pairing, check out "The wrath of the Half Blood prince" and/or "The moment it began", both complete and on ff.net.

I could never get into any type of Fan Fiction for books, TV or Movies (i know stuff like Star Trek is massive when it comes to that ) .
To me the entire proposition of fan fiction always seemed ridiculous "Hey, you like Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd century? wait until you hear what this chubby house frau from Grand Rapids has to say about it !. " When fan fiction becomes good enough to be readable it is then referred to simply as "fiction".
Maybe I'm missing something but i just don't get it . I guess for some readers it fills some odd void left by Characters who are no longer written about by the original author. Maybe that's it

There was a time when fanfic was my crack! I wrote it, read it, and lived it! I think I still have a few stories on fanfiction.net, under the pen name "MissFitt." Beware though, if you try to seek them out and do find them, they are definately not kid-friendly! I wrote some rather sexually explicit stuff. One that I am rather proud of that I know is now gone forever (too explicit apparently, though I didnt see it that way) was a Marauder's era story about Lily and James having their first sexual encounter during a Beltaine celebration at Hogwarts. Maybe I am just pervy, but I always really enjoyed the "lemon" fics, no real plot to speak of, but rather a setting for a sexual situation. My favorite pairings are Lily/Snape, Hermione/Snape, Sirius/Remus, Sirius/Harry, Remus/Harry, Luna/Twins, Tonks/Remus (you don't know how overjoyed I was when that actually happened!) and Whomping Willow/Flying Ford Anglia (did I mention I'm kinda strange?)

I've read some good Harry/Ron stories, mostly involving those nights together in the dormitories, hehe. I don't see how that is debasing at all. Teenagers are curious, horny, and impulsive by nature, and while the books were decidedly chaste in order to appeal to a broader audience, Rowling did not hide the fact that these characters are teenagers and had physical urges (I loved the passages in book 6 about Harry feeling a "monster" inside him whenever he thought of Ginny, and how when they finally got together, there was clear descriptions of how physical they were with each other.) I think a lot of people write and read fanfic (at least the romance/smut genres) in order to fulfill their own desires for the characters the only way they really can. Who hasn't had a crush of some sort on a favourite movie, tv, or book character? Some writers even create their own original characters and insert them into the world of the original story as a sort of avatar for themselves. Among the fanfic community, this is known mockingly as a "Mary-Sue" character (though I have no idea what the origin of that is.), and is often considered self-gratifying to the point of being uninteresting to anyone else, though I have read a few stories that were very enjoyable that contained these kinds of characters.

I don't really write much fiction (fan or otherwise) anymore, but I still enjoy reading the occasional fanfic. I could never bring myself to read anything romantic or sexual about Dumbledore though, because I love that character in more of a paternal way.

I am not appalled by erotica at all, in fact, it kind of has a special place in my heart. When I was around 11 or so, and starting learning the facts of life and the actual mechanics of sex, my mother took me aside and handed me a bunch of erotic historical novels from her bookshelf and said something along the lines of, "well, now you know what goes where, here's how to do it right!" I don't know if this was the wisest course of action on her part, but it started an obsession that I still have to this day. Bertrice Small is my favourite erotica writer, mostly because she writes amazing, well researched historical fiction that just happens to include a lot of graphic sex! I have written a few original stories of my own, and have considered trying to get them published or self publish them, but I lack confidence...I really need to get over that.